 The political economy of labor subsidiesMarina Azzimonti, Eva de Francisco () and Per Krusell No 588, 2006 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Abstract: We explore a political-economy model of labor subsidies, extending Meltzer and Richard's median-voter model to a dynamic setting. We explore only one source of heterogeneity: initial wealth. As a consequence, given an operative wealth effect, poorer agents work harder, and if the agent with median wealth is poorer than average, a politico-economic equilibrium will feature a subsidy to labor. The dynamic model does not have capital, but it has perfect markets for borrowing and lending. This means that another channel appears: tax rates influence interest rates, and this is another channel for redistribution, since a decrease in current interest rates favors agents with below-average wealth. By the same token---and as is typically the case in dynamic politico-economic models with rational agents---the setting features time-inconsistency: the median voter would like to commit not to manipulate interest rates in the future. We define a time-consistent politico-economic equilibrium without commitment as a Markov-perfect equilibrium of a dynamic game between consecutive median voters. We rely on utility functions consistent with aggregation, and we show that, for arbitrary wealth distributions, politico-economic equilibria deliver tax outcomes as a function of a single state variable: median wealth. We use the first-order condition of the median voter to characterize equilibrium. For a parametric example, we study in some detail, both in infinite- and short-horizon contexts, and using a combination of analytical and numerical results, how tax rates and inequality are determined over time Keywords: Redistribution; Time Inconsistency; Markov-Perfect Equilibrium; Median Voter (search for similar items in EconPapers) There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed006:588 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in 2006 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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